Courses
“Fake News” is everywhere in both past and present. Explore that history first-hand throughJHU’s rare book collection of literary and historical forgeries spanning millennia of human history.Students learn how to examine and investigate rare books.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This hands-on course deals entirely with JHU’s collections of rare books and manuscripts as a springboard to build skills in the close visual and physical examination of rare books and manuscripts. You will investigate the technological and aesthetic transformation of textual artifacts from ancient papyri to Gutenberg imprints to digital surrogates, and contribute to the accumulation of historical clues about their meaning and significance as material cultural objects. You will learn what goes into curating and conserving book and manuscript collections today, and how to evaluate the quality and significance of collections. Materials/topics will include ancient Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian papyri; medieval illuminated manuscripts; incunabula; Renaissance illustrated books of the Scientific Revolution and Spanish Golden Age; cheap print and unique ephemera; early books by and about women; forgeries; and “digital humanities” initiatives at JHU. Students will make regular visits to the Special Collections Reading Room in the BLC throughout the semester.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered. Crosslisted with Archaeology, History, History of Art, International Studies and Medicine, Science & Humanities.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Museums face practical, political and ethical challenges, including economic difficulties, debates over interpretation of culture and pressure to demonstrate social value. This course considers how museums are answering these challenges.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction to queer & trans politics and culture in the period immediately preceding the gay liberation movement, from the early to late 1960s, focusing on intersections of race, sexuality, and gender. Course examines how we have come to narrate queer & trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape conceptions of queer & trans life. Students learn research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s digitized archival collections.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to a blend of public history, queer studies and transgender studies. Students learn oral history and archival research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s archival, museum, and library collections.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students will learn current procedures for surveying, cataloguing, documenting and rehousing collections using objects from the Archaeological Museum. This is a hands-on practicum course working closely with museum staff.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This practicum course critically considers current art and history museum education practices and explores social justice discourses through museum visits, visitor studies, and museum learning strategies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the field of conservation and historic preservation through the study of books and library materials, paintings, objects and sites. Lecture topics include: methods of manufacture, agents of deterioration, preservation initiatives, conservation treatment and ethics, and conservation science. A hands-on component will introduce students to triage and stabilization of collections at the George Peabody Library.
Area: Humanities
We explore the possible futures of cultural heritage and museums in times of accelerating climate change, pandemics, armed conflict and political and social turmoil by examining past and contemporary events.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This hands-on course explores interpretive strategies for historic sites and culminates in the production of original, research-based, outdoor interpretive exhibits on the Homewood Campus.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How are museums responding to the pressures to be more equitable, inclusive, and accessible towards public audiences and their staff? Students go behind the scenes of the Smithsonian, Baltimore Museum of Industry and Baltimore Museum of Art to meet with working groups and staff charged with transforming their institutions. Includes site visits, hands-on experiences and research on best practices.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This community-engaged course will address the historic role of the African American cemetery and its present dilemmas. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, and the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, in tandem with classes at Morgan State University and Coppin State University, our collective aim is to further the interests of these local sites by researching and telling stories with community and biographical relevance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What role did the colorful surfaces of sculptures, vessels and textiles play in the ancient world? We examine historical texts and recent scholarly and scientific publications on the technologies and meanings of color in antiquity, and use imaging and analytical techniques to study polychromed objects from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Course will examine the collecting behavior of Americans. Students will explore how collectors have defined the holdings of the nation’s museums, galleries, and libraries and used objects to shape taste and status in the U.S.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
When museums shut their galleries in response to the global pandemic they saw a surge in digital audiences and engagement, athough not everyone can access digital content equally. Continued public health risks bring new challenges to digital interpretation, while universal access as well as embedded racial and gender bias remain significant issues. Students research what works and what doesn't in digital interpretation for art museums, centering social equity and accessibility in their assessment, and develop principles and guidelines for the museum's digital interpretation strategy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
From psycho-spiritual autobiographers to mystical bi-locating nuns, convent crèche-keepers to choristers of sacred music, from rock-star-status mystics to the hidden careers of women printers, engravers, and miracle-makers, this course will explore the remarkable intellectual, cultural, and imaginative contributions of women who found refuge, agency, and power within alternative lives.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Gertrude Stein was a writer who was disparaged, yet wildly popular; a celebrity as well as an object of scorn; openly yet invisibly queer. Reading selections of Stein’s writing and that of her friends, lovers, and enemies, we will study her networks, art collection, and cultural status, and work extensively with rare books and archival materials, to explore these dilemmas. Student research will be incorporated into a major exhibition at the George Peabody Library in spring 2024.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines recent controversies in the conservation of major global art works and sites, raising questions concerning the basic theoretical assumptions, practical methods and ethical implications of art conservation. Cross-Listed with History of Art and Anthropology
Area: Humanities
Go behind the scenes of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Education Department and develop and implement programs for college students in conjunction with an exhibition about women and art in early modern Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students examine select texts and archival materials related to Emily Dickinson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Wharton, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Alice Duer Miller, and Zora Neale Hurston. Students interrogate how these writers navigated the constraints of gender, as informed by race and class, in the decades before and after the 19th Amendment and consider literary collecting in relation to gendered cultural politics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore the landscape history and current arrangement of the area around JHU’s Homewood campus, including Evergreen Museum, coinciding with the bi-centennial of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted whose design firm played a central role in developing plans for and around JHU. The course will culminate in a student-produced exhibit for a public audience.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students learn to conduct, analyze, and interpret their own oral histories as they contribute to a wide-ranging project documenting queer worldmaking in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. region. We engage with scholarship from performance studies, queer of color critique, LGBTQ history, and public humanities to consider the politics of storytelling and the promises of public-facing oral history projects. Students have the option of developing podcasts, multimedia projects, and public humanities proposals as their final assignment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A material cultural exploration of the Vatican from the founding of St. Peter’s basilica in antiquity to the establishment of the Vatican Library and Museums in the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Students investigate the Baltimore Museum of Art’s American art collection and its presentation to the public alongside current scholarship on American art to develop strategies for a new permanent collection display that aligns with the museum’s commitment to artistic excellence and social equity. M&S Practicum. Co-taught with BMA curator Virginia Anderson.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students go behind the scenes at JHU’s own Evergreen Museum and Library to investigate how historic sites design spaces for learning, community engagement, leisure, as well as for exhibitions and special events. Students consider the history of Evergreen and its inhabitants and create concepts for how to engage communities in that history and story. Multiple class meetings take place at the Evergreen Museum.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Investigates collaborative humanities methods that foster democratic participation among publics more broadly conceived than the academy, including participatory action research, collaborative oral history, indigenous research methods, interactive theater, participatory archival practices, and cooperative models for connecting art, artists, and audiences. Course focuses on queer, trans, and Black histories in Baltimore, includes excursions to local cultural institutions, and is co-taught by prominent public humanists, artists, and activists from Baltimore and beyond.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The Capstone allows students to develop and carry out their own, hands-on research project in a museum, collection, archive, or other living resource. Final projects must involve some form of public presentation (exhibition, lecture, poster, web-based, etc.) and a work of self-reflection (journal, brief paper, blog, or other). Projects must be approved and overseen by a supervising faculty member and approved by the Program's Director, in keeping with the University's Independent Work Policy. Instructor permission required.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The Capstone allows students to develop and carry out their own, hands-on research project in a museum, collection, archive, or other living resource. Final projects must involve some form of public presentation (exhibition, poster, web-based, etc.) and a work of self-reflection (journal, brief paper, blog, or other). Projects must be approved and overseen by a supervising faculty member and approved by the Program's Director, in keeping with the University's Independent Work Policy.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.;AS.389.201;AS.389.202